Trauma 209 RP - Resurrection: Part 1 - Lazarus
Apr 18, 2017 12:27:32 GMT -5
Alexa Black and The Anarchist like this
Post by Non Compos Mentis on Apr 18, 2017 12:27:32 GMT -5
So by now the cat is out of the bag. NCM is the first mystery entrant in the Icemann Invitational. In the interest of openness, I present to you my rp for Trauma 209.
June 4th 2016, Greenville, South Carolina.
“He's awake?” A faintly British voice arose from the shadows at the end of the room. A familiar voice, one he felt he'd heard only moments before and yet his body told him it had been days, perhaps weeks, since the last time.
“Awake, yes, but not concious. It should take some time before he regains all his senses.” The exotic accent of a second individual, a woman, was much closer. As he lay still she was stood directly behind his head. Her sensuous voice was familiar too, from so recent a time, and yet what felt like another life.
He tried to move his legs, to swing them off the bed and get to his feet, but his body remained still. At the very limit of his vision the first voice gained form from the darkness. A shock of copper coloured hair gave it a name. Altman; Cleric of The Order, his handler, a reluctant ally and the man whose actions had put him in that hospital.
“Good.,” spoke Altman with all the coldness he had grown accustomed to, “the last thing we need is him remembering we were here.”
“Tensions with the Heirophants are already strained after Nathan Saniti took the Seed; not that they would have been able to control it anyway.” Altman continued as he paced purposefully across the room to stand at the man's side. He placed his hands on the rail that lined a hospital bed and the patient heard the squeal of leather gloves being clenched against metal. “If they knew we were using your talents to heal him too? Well let's hope it never comes to that.”
“You made a deal; Calder for their freedom. This is the right thing to do.” Adalina Gatti spoke with compassion, as she always had, and the motionless man noticed her warm hands cradling his head on either side. His neck, badly broken by the darkness-infused Alexa Black, painless and no longer crippled. The Spellslinger's hands had done their duty once more.
The room fell silent for a moment as Altman, the patient felt, considered if it sincerely was the right thing to heal him of the wounds he had forced him into.
“Yes, a deal is a deal.” The Cleric pondered. Cautiously, Altman slipped his hand into his night-black overcoat and produced a slip of paper from the inner pocket before placing it intricately into the large man's lifeless hand. “And it is time to honour yours now too. Time to go Ms. Gatti.”
After a moment of indecision Adalina nodded and Altman paced to the door. Once excommunicated from her home in The Order, it seemed Adalina's aid in ridding them of Calder had earned her a second chance.
The wild-looking man should have felt joy for her, relief of her chance to redeem her name, for without The Order he had seen her vivacious form wither into a tortured shell of a woman.
He did not.
As the Cleric left the room, Adalina carefully held his head and leant in closer. With her soft, passionate Italian accent she spoke to what she assumed were deaf ears. “For all that has happened, for all The Order has done to you, you are free from these chains now. Go with grace, and have mercy.”
Placing her lips to his scarred forehead, Adalina gave her final farewell and sauntered to the door. With a last longing look, she vanished.
The night drifted on as Sean Rhodes lay in that home for the infirm, unable to move, unable to sleep, only focused on the lack of pain in his neck and the words left in his mind. Hours passed in the dark as painfully slowly the paralysis that allowed the full healing of his neck faded. He remembered the note and, as his hands were freed from their slumber, he read what had been left for him by Altman.
The address of a decrepit hotel they had left his Ezra in while he recovered. Somewhere just outside of Greenville the boy Guardian waited; malnourished and weak, alone, but now free from the oppressive yoke of The Order.
Once Sean's body was resurrected from the agony that Alexa Black had inflicted upon him and the paralysis over his limbs had passed, he dragged himself from the hospital. Past the unbelieving eyes of doctors who had attended his slow funeral he stumbled, out into the twilit morning, off to the dingy motel that housed his decrepit Guardian. As the sun came up, Sean found his barely-breathing body lying in a single cot, abandoned by the last of The Order that he had devoted his entire life to.
The ashen skin clung to his bones. His eyes bloodshot and vacant. His hair soiled into a grey, insipid matted mess. Gone was the silver-haired boy Sean had loved, replaced by a ghost that seemed to have been dredged back from the grave against its will.
What little food they had given him wasn't enough after Calder's torture, but it would have to do. The journey ahead would be a lonely and starving one for them both.
Some time later. Schenectady, New York.
“Where have you brought us, Sean?” The boy whispered desperately from beneath a mop of tangled silver hair.
The sign above the door welcomed the needy, the vulnerable and the desperate. It welcomed the lowest of all who walked the streets. “Home, Ezra, I brought us home.” It was the only one either of them had left.
For weeks, perhaps months, Ezra Colne was nursed back from the brink of death inside the filthy walls of St Jude's Shelter. With every day of his recovery he grew sicker and more embittered.
It wasn't just that the only family he'd ever known had betrayed him. Nor was it that they had used him as a tool to capture their real prize. It wasn't even that said prize had dragged him away from every worldly possession in his life.
What courted his rage most was that his life had been traded and his would-be carer had brought him... here.
From the moment of his birth Ezra had been indoctrinated in the ways of The Order and their revelry in the grey area of morality. As the title may suggest, they were a regimented organisation and Ezra's life had been founded on that structure. And that had been replaced by this; a homeless shelter in Schenectady, New York, led by the will of a man fractured into pieces.
What Alexa Black had done to him could not be understated. Not only his back had been shattered, but the fragments of his pieced-together psyche had been blown to smithereens in the process too.
Sean Rhodes sat by his side for day upon day. As Ezra refused to speak, Sean remained silent. At night, however, Ezra heard the howls that came from the rooms around him; the telltale sounds of madness from deranged animals. Beyond them he heard the doctrine, the sermons and the commandments being passed down by the lunatic guru.
Make no mistake, the man that handed down those blood and thunder orders was Non Compos Mentis, but the one that sat beside him every day was Sean Rhodes. The one that brought him back from the torture, the malnutrition and degradation The Order had used on him to draw out what they needed, was the man and not the monster.
And yet when Ezra finally came to talk again, his words ignored the devotion that had been showed to him.
“Take me back.” Ezra coldly commanded, sat on the edge of his bed while Sean carefully shaved his cheek.
“No.” Replied Sean, just as bluntly.
Ezra's hands still shook from the abuse he'd endured at the hands of his surrogate family but that day they trembled even more. The building was a living, throbbing environment that represented the loss of everything that had ever mattered in his life and he wanted rid of it. At some point, wouldn't The Order accept him back? Wouldn't they forgive the loss of their messianic disciple eventually?
“They'd kill you. You know that. It doesn't matter how long you stay away or how much you try to give back. You're with me now and you'll pay a price if you ever go back.” The blades skimmed over Ezra's skin as Sean's subtle movement belied his scarred hands.
In silence, Ezra's entire body seemed to lose what little life it still contained as his shoulders slumped and the light drained from his eyes. “I don't care, let them kill m...AGHH!”
Snow-white shaving cream turned crimson in an instant. The same subtle hands had acted with swift cruelty and cut a swathe out of the once-youthful man's face. The attack left Ezra clutching his cheek in shock as Non Compos Mentis clenched his hand around the razor. The bitterness in him, the resentment for everything he had done in the name of saving Ezra only to receive this thanks, rose to the surface.
“Grow a spine, you're not some bastard emo.” NCM remembered what Ezra had been when he'd met him as a forced inductee into The Order. While Mentis was a prospective Seeker intended to be a catalyst for a radical movement, Ezra had been raised from birth as a warrior and had been assigned to protect him at all costs. “You're supposed to be a soldier, my guardian. And now you're... this?”
Blood ran down the face of the withered young man, and in its wake came the shame and anger. He thought about the man that had saved him and the monster that was in front of him. Over the stretching time of his convalescence, Ezra had seen Mentis distort the world around him, spreading the sickness that had entered him since Alexa Black had defeated him. He had become the leader of a group of disciples that followed his addled mind like rats to rotten flesh. They thought him their messiah, their saviour, a role Ezra knew he had coveted before.
A horde was being raised, and where there is a horde there is a quarry to be plundered. There was only one thing Mentis was known for, only one that he had carved a name into history for, and only one he would have his demented mind set on now. “And what are you? Some fucking God? That's what they want you to be, and now you've got all of them drinking your cool-aid you're going to take them back to PCW to chase that poisoned chalice, aren't you?”
It had been ten months since Mentis had been destroyed by Alexa Black, all of which had been devoted to building the shelter as a home to his new army, and also to nursing Ezra back to health. Ten months of resentment and agony, for doing nothing more than caring. “I'm what they need me to be, nothing more.”
“And what about what I need?” Ezra's naked body seemed then to open up as a child would when wanting an embrace from a parent. What did he need? He needed this to end. For the man in front of him to stop whatever madness had possessed him and hold him as he once had. Or, an end to it all.
Mentis spoke softly, considerately, as he leant forward to meet Ezra's yearning body. “You think you need to go back to that hell hole, even if they'd burn you at the stake as a traitor?”
“Yes.” The word escaped as if on a wisp of air.
A sigh crawled out of Mentis' mouth, a sigh of resignation. He lifted the hand that held the razor and, with no warning, smashed it into the bedside cabinet beside him. Ezra flinched as the flimsy plastic snapped, firing across the room and into walls. The only thing left of it under Sean's hand was the blade itself and he left it there, waiting.
“Then finish it now. I've got better things to do than shave a dead boy's cheeks. If you really want to go back then you might as well use that right now, you'll save us both the time.” Sean choked out, even in spite of his anger he still loved the man in front of him. At least he loved the Ezra he had once known.
“You'll have plenty of time to think about it, because while you're sitting here feeling sorry for yourself I'll be back in Greenville, being what you actually need.” Ezra sat in shock as Mentis stood in front of him, left the razor on the cabinet and walked to the door quite content in the idea that if he was devoted to his ideas of escapism he would take the edge to his own wrists sooner rather than later. “Not some God or messiah, or some god-forsaken cult. A fucking man doing what needs to be done.”
As he left, NCM was convinced of his actions, leaving the boy that he loved to choose his fate. The Ezra he had known was dead, blood spilt or not, and the other-worldly bond they had shared was a noose around both their necks. For months on end Mentis had sought to save Ezra from a fatal end at the hands of The Order, but now he realised his heart-bound companion had died in spirit somewhere along the way. The razor would either condemn him to whatever cold hell his heart had fallen into, or raise him up from the pit of despair he had descended into.
Whatever the case, NCM knew it was time his own life needed to find a sense of purpose once more.
Years before, he had adopted a family of vagrants and vagabonds who had shared his disenfranchised spirit; over the last ten months he had accumulated a following who shared his particular sense of frustration at the world. Mentis had grown to loath the world that had forgotten him oh-so-quickly following his destruction at Living a Legacy. He had been discarded once again and now, with power and influence back at his fingertips, he dearly wanted to wreak his revenge on Pure Class Wrestling.
The perfect opportunity was coming; the Icemann Invitational Tournament. With a title opportunity on the line and the best and brightest PCW could off being involved, NCM would cut a swathe through the company and send the established order of the last ten months into chaos. What better way would there be to exact his vengeance than to take from them what he had given up in protest the first time he had raised his hobo horde? How sorely would they mourn the desecration of their PCW World Championship?
Nothing else was acceptable. Nothing else would do. Once the choice was made to rejoin the ranks of Pure Class Wrestling, only the championship would be good enough. The PCW Faithful had condemned him to death with their ambivalence, now he was resurrected in hate.
It didn't matter who he faced in the first round of the Icemann Invitational, with the horde at his side he knew nothing could truly beat him; nobody would know what was coming or how to fight it.
They never had.
June 4th 2016, Greenville, South Carolina.
“He's awake?” A faintly British voice arose from the shadows at the end of the room. A familiar voice, one he felt he'd heard only moments before and yet his body told him it had been days, perhaps weeks, since the last time.
“Awake, yes, but not concious. It should take some time before he regains all his senses.” The exotic accent of a second individual, a woman, was much closer. As he lay still she was stood directly behind his head. Her sensuous voice was familiar too, from so recent a time, and yet what felt like another life.
He tried to move his legs, to swing them off the bed and get to his feet, but his body remained still. At the very limit of his vision the first voice gained form from the darkness. A shock of copper coloured hair gave it a name. Altman; Cleric of The Order, his handler, a reluctant ally and the man whose actions had put him in that hospital.
“Good.,” spoke Altman with all the coldness he had grown accustomed to, “the last thing we need is him remembering we were here.”
“Tensions with the Heirophants are already strained after Nathan Saniti took the Seed; not that they would have been able to control it anyway.” Altman continued as he paced purposefully across the room to stand at the man's side. He placed his hands on the rail that lined a hospital bed and the patient heard the squeal of leather gloves being clenched against metal. “If they knew we were using your talents to heal him too? Well let's hope it never comes to that.”
“You made a deal; Calder for their freedom. This is the right thing to do.” Adalina Gatti spoke with compassion, as she always had, and the motionless man noticed her warm hands cradling his head on either side. His neck, badly broken by the darkness-infused Alexa Black, painless and no longer crippled. The Spellslinger's hands had done their duty once more.
The room fell silent for a moment as Altman, the patient felt, considered if it sincerely was the right thing to heal him of the wounds he had forced him into.
“Yes, a deal is a deal.” The Cleric pondered. Cautiously, Altman slipped his hand into his night-black overcoat and produced a slip of paper from the inner pocket before placing it intricately into the large man's lifeless hand. “And it is time to honour yours now too. Time to go Ms. Gatti.”
After a moment of indecision Adalina nodded and Altman paced to the door. Once excommunicated from her home in The Order, it seemed Adalina's aid in ridding them of Calder had earned her a second chance.
The wild-looking man should have felt joy for her, relief of her chance to redeem her name, for without The Order he had seen her vivacious form wither into a tortured shell of a woman.
He did not.
As the Cleric left the room, Adalina carefully held his head and leant in closer. With her soft, passionate Italian accent she spoke to what she assumed were deaf ears. “For all that has happened, for all The Order has done to you, you are free from these chains now. Go with grace, and have mercy.”
Placing her lips to his scarred forehead, Adalina gave her final farewell and sauntered to the door. With a last longing look, she vanished.
The night drifted on as Sean Rhodes lay in that home for the infirm, unable to move, unable to sleep, only focused on the lack of pain in his neck and the words left in his mind. Hours passed in the dark as painfully slowly the paralysis that allowed the full healing of his neck faded. He remembered the note and, as his hands were freed from their slumber, he read what had been left for him by Altman.
The address of a decrepit hotel they had left his Ezra in while he recovered. Somewhere just outside of Greenville the boy Guardian waited; malnourished and weak, alone, but now free from the oppressive yoke of The Order.
Once Sean's body was resurrected from the agony that Alexa Black had inflicted upon him and the paralysis over his limbs had passed, he dragged himself from the hospital. Past the unbelieving eyes of doctors who had attended his slow funeral he stumbled, out into the twilit morning, off to the dingy motel that housed his decrepit Guardian. As the sun came up, Sean found his barely-breathing body lying in a single cot, abandoned by the last of The Order that he had devoted his entire life to.
The ashen skin clung to his bones. His eyes bloodshot and vacant. His hair soiled into a grey, insipid matted mess. Gone was the silver-haired boy Sean had loved, replaced by a ghost that seemed to have been dredged back from the grave against its will.
What little food they had given him wasn't enough after Calder's torture, but it would have to do. The journey ahead would be a lonely and starving one for them both.
Some time later. Schenectady, New York.
“Where have you brought us, Sean?” The boy whispered desperately from beneath a mop of tangled silver hair.
The sign above the door welcomed the needy, the vulnerable and the desperate. It welcomed the lowest of all who walked the streets. “Home, Ezra, I brought us home.” It was the only one either of them had left.
For weeks, perhaps months, Ezra Colne was nursed back from the brink of death inside the filthy walls of St Jude's Shelter. With every day of his recovery he grew sicker and more embittered.
It wasn't just that the only family he'd ever known had betrayed him. Nor was it that they had used him as a tool to capture their real prize. It wasn't even that said prize had dragged him away from every worldly possession in his life.
What courted his rage most was that his life had been traded and his would-be carer had brought him... here.
From the moment of his birth Ezra had been indoctrinated in the ways of The Order and their revelry in the grey area of morality. As the title may suggest, they were a regimented organisation and Ezra's life had been founded on that structure. And that had been replaced by this; a homeless shelter in Schenectady, New York, led by the will of a man fractured into pieces.
What Alexa Black had done to him could not be understated. Not only his back had been shattered, but the fragments of his pieced-together psyche had been blown to smithereens in the process too.
Sean Rhodes sat by his side for day upon day. As Ezra refused to speak, Sean remained silent. At night, however, Ezra heard the howls that came from the rooms around him; the telltale sounds of madness from deranged animals. Beyond them he heard the doctrine, the sermons and the commandments being passed down by the lunatic guru.
Make no mistake, the man that handed down those blood and thunder orders was Non Compos Mentis, but the one that sat beside him every day was Sean Rhodes. The one that brought him back from the torture, the malnutrition and degradation The Order had used on him to draw out what they needed, was the man and not the monster.
And yet when Ezra finally came to talk again, his words ignored the devotion that had been showed to him.
“Take me back.” Ezra coldly commanded, sat on the edge of his bed while Sean carefully shaved his cheek.
“No.” Replied Sean, just as bluntly.
Ezra's hands still shook from the abuse he'd endured at the hands of his surrogate family but that day they trembled even more. The building was a living, throbbing environment that represented the loss of everything that had ever mattered in his life and he wanted rid of it. At some point, wouldn't The Order accept him back? Wouldn't they forgive the loss of their messianic disciple eventually?
“They'd kill you. You know that. It doesn't matter how long you stay away or how much you try to give back. You're with me now and you'll pay a price if you ever go back.” The blades skimmed over Ezra's skin as Sean's subtle movement belied his scarred hands.
In silence, Ezra's entire body seemed to lose what little life it still contained as his shoulders slumped and the light drained from his eyes. “I don't care, let them kill m...AGHH!”
Snow-white shaving cream turned crimson in an instant. The same subtle hands had acted with swift cruelty and cut a swathe out of the once-youthful man's face. The attack left Ezra clutching his cheek in shock as Non Compos Mentis clenched his hand around the razor. The bitterness in him, the resentment for everything he had done in the name of saving Ezra only to receive this thanks, rose to the surface.
“Grow a spine, you're not some bastard emo.” NCM remembered what Ezra had been when he'd met him as a forced inductee into The Order. While Mentis was a prospective Seeker intended to be a catalyst for a radical movement, Ezra had been raised from birth as a warrior and had been assigned to protect him at all costs. “You're supposed to be a soldier, my guardian. And now you're... this?”
Blood ran down the face of the withered young man, and in its wake came the shame and anger. He thought about the man that had saved him and the monster that was in front of him. Over the stretching time of his convalescence, Ezra had seen Mentis distort the world around him, spreading the sickness that had entered him since Alexa Black had defeated him. He had become the leader of a group of disciples that followed his addled mind like rats to rotten flesh. They thought him their messiah, their saviour, a role Ezra knew he had coveted before.
A horde was being raised, and where there is a horde there is a quarry to be plundered. There was only one thing Mentis was known for, only one that he had carved a name into history for, and only one he would have his demented mind set on now. “And what are you? Some fucking God? That's what they want you to be, and now you've got all of them drinking your cool-aid you're going to take them back to PCW to chase that poisoned chalice, aren't you?”
It had been ten months since Mentis had been destroyed by Alexa Black, all of which had been devoted to building the shelter as a home to his new army, and also to nursing Ezra back to health. Ten months of resentment and agony, for doing nothing more than caring. “I'm what they need me to be, nothing more.”
“And what about what I need?” Ezra's naked body seemed then to open up as a child would when wanting an embrace from a parent. What did he need? He needed this to end. For the man in front of him to stop whatever madness had possessed him and hold him as he once had. Or, an end to it all.
Mentis spoke softly, considerately, as he leant forward to meet Ezra's yearning body. “You think you need to go back to that hell hole, even if they'd burn you at the stake as a traitor?”
“Yes.” The word escaped as if on a wisp of air.
A sigh crawled out of Mentis' mouth, a sigh of resignation. He lifted the hand that held the razor and, with no warning, smashed it into the bedside cabinet beside him. Ezra flinched as the flimsy plastic snapped, firing across the room and into walls. The only thing left of it under Sean's hand was the blade itself and he left it there, waiting.
“Then finish it now. I've got better things to do than shave a dead boy's cheeks. If you really want to go back then you might as well use that right now, you'll save us both the time.” Sean choked out, even in spite of his anger he still loved the man in front of him. At least he loved the Ezra he had once known.
“You'll have plenty of time to think about it, because while you're sitting here feeling sorry for yourself I'll be back in Greenville, being what you actually need.” Ezra sat in shock as Mentis stood in front of him, left the razor on the cabinet and walked to the door quite content in the idea that if he was devoted to his ideas of escapism he would take the edge to his own wrists sooner rather than later. “Not some God or messiah, or some god-forsaken cult. A fucking man doing what needs to be done.”
As he left, NCM was convinced of his actions, leaving the boy that he loved to choose his fate. The Ezra he had known was dead, blood spilt or not, and the other-worldly bond they had shared was a noose around both their necks. For months on end Mentis had sought to save Ezra from a fatal end at the hands of The Order, but now he realised his heart-bound companion had died in spirit somewhere along the way. The razor would either condemn him to whatever cold hell his heart had fallen into, or raise him up from the pit of despair he had descended into.
Whatever the case, NCM knew it was time his own life needed to find a sense of purpose once more.
Years before, he had adopted a family of vagrants and vagabonds who had shared his disenfranchised spirit; over the last ten months he had accumulated a following who shared his particular sense of frustration at the world. Mentis had grown to loath the world that had forgotten him oh-so-quickly following his destruction at Living a Legacy. He had been discarded once again and now, with power and influence back at his fingertips, he dearly wanted to wreak his revenge on Pure Class Wrestling.
The perfect opportunity was coming; the Icemann Invitational Tournament. With a title opportunity on the line and the best and brightest PCW could off being involved, NCM would cut a swathe through the company and send the established order of the last ten months into chaos. What better way would there be to exact his vengeance than to take from them what he had given up in protest the first time he had raised his hobo horde? How sorely would they mourn the desecration of their PCW World Championship?
Nothing else was acceptable. Nothing else would do. Once the choice was made to rejoin the ranks of Pure Class Wrestling, only the championship would be good enough. The PCW Faithful had condemned him to death with their ambivalence, now he was resurrected in hate.
It didn't matter who he faced in the first round of the Icemann Invitational, with the horde at his side he knew nothing could truly beat him; nobody would know what was coming or how to fight it.
They never had.
